Astronomers find a 'solar twin’ — a star that looks almost exactly like our Sun

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HD186302 is a main sequence star, and it sits about 184 light-years from Earth. The star has roughly the same age, metallicity, chemical abundances and even ratios of carbon isotopes as the Sun. In other words, it's just about as Sun-like as you can get.

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This star and HD 162826, at 110 light years away, will be excellent candidates for study with the James Webb Space Telescope. If it ever gets launched, that is. Originally scheduled to be launched in 2009, it is now supposed to go into space in 2021. We'll see.

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In a follow-up campaign, the team plans to use ESO’s ESPRESSO and HARPS spectrographs to scan the star for orbiting planets. If found, astronomers could compare the planets that formed around our Sun to those that formed around one of its siblings, revealing the types of planets that our ancient star cluster might have left behind.

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At least the Europeans are equipped to give us some idea of planets around the two sun like stars. It'll be interesting to know if their solar systems developed in any way similar to ours.

And how much more grant money do they get to continue this study?

Named HD186302......crap, I was gonna use that for my next child.

The more I research this, the more I’m convinced that announcing a planet in the Goldilocks zone is just a look at me moment. So many things are necessary to support life, location is only the first one.

Just as important is a moon with enough mass to create the molten dynamo that generates the magnetosphere that protects us from the solar wind. I think we’re going to find a lot more variables that will become necessary as we learn more. Which I believe life is rarer than most of the posters here. There are what? Trillions of galaxies or is it mere billions? With billions of stars.Which means the right conditions are present maybe only a few hundred million times, which still makes it rare.

Honestly I’d be shocked if we found life elsewhere before another asteroid comes along and terminates us. You know it’s going to happen. We know it’s happened before and yet we do virtually nothing to prevent it.

It’s more important to talk about a fricking wall.

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It’s more important to talk about a fricking wall.

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We take refuge in the mundane and petty.

There are political issues from twenty years ago that had the nation in an uproar then that are now forgotten about. We progress, as a species, because a few people here and there do something important. Then the rest of us sort of amble along behind them.

Which is needed and necessary. It takes hundreds of thousands of folks who are just trying to do their jobs and raise their families to provide the stable environment necessary for some visionary to come along and drag us forward a little bit.

Democrat or Republican. Socialist or Capitalist. Someone has to make the sausages. People will always pay more attention to yet another picture of Miley Cyrus peeing in public then they will the latest scientific discovery. It happens. We will keep moving along, a little bit here, a little bit there.

Would take nearly 2 million years to get to

Yet to get the nukes to the ship, you have to lift them on a rocket.

There’s all sorts of problems with that.

It won’t happen in my lifetime, but we’ll know they’re serious about space exploration/colonization when they build a space needle.

Theoretically we possess the ability to build a warp drive. The biggest stumbling block? It would take the GDP of every industrialized country on the planet to finance it. We are already capable of producing antimatter with the Hadron Supercollider. An antimatter Drive would require roughly 10 grams of antimatter to get us to Proxima Centauri in 40 years. The problem is that the supercollider is incapable of producing anywhere near that much. We need 1000’s of supercolliders. So, in essence, the entire planet would need to be in danger of eminent demise before all the countries could come together with the single focus of interplanetary travel.